It's hard to be emotionally engaged with gaming (or at least try to), when you have to struggle through the established genre conventions; how am I to enjoy the literary aestethics of Earthbound, if I'm constantly dying in random encounters, and the mere fact of Earthbound being an arpg creates a little wall that I can't simply jump over, since my feet have never strutted the fantasmagorical shores of any respected representatives of the jrpg genre. It all begins with frustration: why is my character so damn slow, why do I have to take all these random encounters, is it essential for this game to have an jrpg formula or was it forced on, etc. Having played Undertale, you start suspecting a joke going on, concerning the oh-so-real hostile combat mechanics, when you can't believe there's no "spare" button, or any sort of option to resolve things peacefully; do the devs think I'm having the best time of my life bludgeoning stray dogs with a baseball bat until they bleed? or death in the Earthbound world was literally diminished to a spoof of particles, meaning dogs aren't dogs hence you can't kill them hence don't forget you're playing a goddarn videogame, asshole, none of it is real! What about the friends we made along the way then? Are those also "not real"?

Eventually this dispute should turn into a war on the jrpg genre. How many other games do you know that you love, but don't like to play? "I've been a big fan of Pathologic for almost five years, maybe it's finally time to play it". "I love the lore of Dark Souls, but the game is just too hard for me to enjoy", etc. Would you really blame the racing game for inaccessibility just because you don't like racing games?

What I'm against is the things that prevent you from progression, and I don't mean to be a kind of guy who demands an easy mode for any FromSofrware game; the difficulty is the core of those games, completely tied with its philosophy; but when a bunch of UFOs are stonewalling my 8-year old protagonist's progression, I'm beginning to question my vision of what this game's metaphysical nature is. Did I get it all wrong? Will all the mysteries be revealed in the end? Can we even get there? Or making the protagonist a child should not necessarily apply the game is for kids? pls make it a little bit easier? Seriously, at times I feel like Guts in Berserk: Millennium Falcon for PS2, constantly surrounded by enemies, fighting through the tightening walls of flesh.

If somehow what was said above is factually incorrect, or simply delusional, then, well, I have an excuse: I'm stuck in the forest because a grey pencil is blocking my way, and the UFOs are bombarding my unconscious body. Yes, all of it was a plea for help. Help! What do I do here? And there's no way I'm spending 35 dollars for a hint. And don't go jumping on me with "just google it". Imagine it's 1994, there's no guides and no friends to ask. Well, yes, I would eventually crack the code, because as a kid I remember being patient enough to master the original Contra, beating it with three lifes. And a Sega's Tazmania. And almost beating the racing level in Battletoads (well, getting there would already make you a hardcore gamer). What I wanna say is I don't have enough patience in me anymore. As a kid you haven't had any alternatives, so you played the same game over and over again, perhaps falling in love with it in the process. You could beat it with no safe-files in one go. And now I'm screaming like a mad rascal, when Jak II resets me to the very beginning of the mission. My momma didn't mean to raise me a man who's watching his movies on 2x speed, but here we are. Life is just too short to not find out what happens next in Earthbound. Will I conquer my demons? Follow me for the updates.